At age 91, South Burlington resident Garry Davis has always seemed in his element when the cameras are rolling.

That may explain why, in a new documentary about his life’s mission, there’s so much mid-20th century newsreel footage of him as a young man leading a massive protest movement in France. In his heyday, he made headlines.

“I wanted to create a big act on a global level,” said Davis, a Broadway “song-and-dance man” until 1948. That’s when he decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship in Paris and push for a world government dedicated to preventing war.

“My Country is the World and the World is My Stage,” a chronicle of his early activism and how Davis has continued that effort in the subsequent 65 years, is a work-in-progress by California filmmaker Arthur Kanegis. “A lot of people talk about peace; here’s a guy actually living it,” Kanegis suggested during a telephone interview from San Diego.

In the Queen City’s Old North End, Kanegis — who has known Davis for more than three decades — will screen a public sneak preview of the unfinished movie tonight. He also plans to film Davis delivering a biographical monologue for local live audiences, in English on Friday and in French on Sunday.

Already in the can, Kanegis has the likes of Will Ferrell, Eva Longoria and other Hollywood luminaries reciting portions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations General Assembly’s 1948 ruling on humanity’s inherent liberties.

Only 26 at the time, Davis had stood up in the balcony during a previous U.N. session in Paris to demand that the international body establish “one government for one world.” He was supported by French authors Albert Camus and Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide, among other intellectuals. Thousands of war-weary Europeans attended rallies where Davis spoke about his cause.

The Declaration of Human Rights is the basis for what he envisioned as planetary citizenship. Davis proclaimed himself “a sovereign world government,” in order to carry out functions normally reserved for nation-states. His organization — the World Service Authority in Washington, D.C. — now provides passports and similar identification papers to people, many of whom are displaced by social upheaval. Two million such documents have been issued to date.

(Page 2 of 2)

“You have the right to travel anywhere on your own planet,” Davis said recently.

Although even physicist Albert Einstein and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed his views, Davis wound up in jail 34 times over the years, primarily for trying to cross borders with no passport in hand, he says. Conversely, he says his own “world passport” proved to be successful in almost 200 instances.

The idea for a film was sparked by Davis’ 1961 memoir “My Country is the World: The Adventures of a World Citizen,” which Kanegis read in the 1990s. “It has incredible action and drama,” he recalled, adding that the project’s framework is a scripted, contemporary one-man show enhanced with plentiful archival material.

“It was amazing to find that so much footage exists,” Kanegis said.

The documentary includes scenes of Davis, a comedian at heart, in Broadway musicals. He left acting behind during World War II and flew missions for the Air Corps. Then his older brother, who had joined the Navy, was killed in action.

Davis wanted revenge against the Nazis. But after a bombing sortie over the German town of Brandenburg, the American experienced a catharsis. “It was mass murder,” he said, referring to this event as the reason he became haunted by “my own personal PTSD”

From that point on, Davis was a driven by a single-minded purpose: the establishment of a world government that would outlaw all future wars and allow travel across national boundaries.

When Kanegis came up with the idea for a film, Davis immediately agreed. “The name of the game is getting the news out,” he said. “We have to wake up and realize we’re all human beings living on one planet. That’s my whole story.”